Share this:

Artist John Warhus, 70, of Richmond, begins to dismantle light stands in his studio at Bridge Storage and Art Space in Richmond, Calif. on Friday, Dec. 9, 2016. In the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, the city told the owner that artists could no longer use the space. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

Musicians and venue operators involved in the East Bay’s DIY music scene blame an onerous, expensive and time-consuming permitting process for pushing people into underground spaces where the desire for inclusion sometimes outweighs safety concerns.

Traditional music venues, such as bars and nightclubs that have higher overhead costs, are less willing to take risks on experimental and lesser-known acts, and many underground musicians say they simply have nowhere else to go.

As fire investigators continue to sift through the charred rubble of the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, where an inferno claimed the lives of 36 people attending a dance party Dec. 2, city officials in the East Bay are turning their attention to similarly nonconforming spaces and have pledged to crack down on illegal events.

var _ndnq = _ndnq || []; _ndnq.push([’embed’]);

On any given weekend night in Oakland, there are an estimated 10 underground shows hosting a variety of music genres, said one former venue operator who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution for hosting unpermitted shows. His landlord on Saturday evicted him and his five housemates from their East Oakland warehouse, where he hosted electronic, hip-hop and rock shows, he said.

At a news conference Wednesday, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said the city would be considering new regulations, including the “permitting of events and the monitoring of illegal events,” and would be developing ways for city employees to more effectively share information among city departments regarding dangerous living conditions or events held without permits.

The Oakland fire has many cities on edge. In Emeryville, officials pre-emptively shut down a music show and fundraiser for the victims of the Ghost Ship tragedy scheduled last Wednesday at Midsummer Studios, a private film production studio, said co-founder Colin Shane Hakes. He said they were able to quickly move the show to the Starline Social Club in Oakland just hours before the event but were told they couldn’t host any other public events until they secure the requisite permits.

In Richmond, city officials pledged to crack down on the punk rock venue, Burnt Ramen, which hosts live bands. It also told Bridge Storage and Art Space — a unique hybrid of storage units, art studios and music rehearsal spaces, which sometimes hosts parties and shows — that the artists and musicians could no longer use the units to practice and work.

“Now with what happened in Oakland, suddenly there’s a bright light on everything,” said Jeff Wright, who owns the facility. “Lines that were construed to be fuzzy are not fuzzy anymore.”

That puts musicians like Kyrsten Bean in a bind. She had been using the affordable space for the past four years because she can’t set up amplifiers and a drum set in her North Oakland duplex. Now, she’s worried about where she and her band-mates will go.

“Not having a place to set up our amps means we can’t practice, which means we can’t get ready to play shows,” Bean said. “I’m actually frightened — like, where are we going to go now?”

The number of spaces that will admit bands such as hers — one with an unconventional thrasher-infused, post-punk rock sound that doesn’t have a large following — are few and far between, she said. It was in part the lack of venues willing to book her band that made Bean ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach when she stepped into the Ghost Ship warehouse the first time. Her initial reaction was to walk out, which she did, she said, but then she went back inside and lugged her gear up a “frightening” staircase.

“I was just so happy to have an inclusive place to play in,” Bean said. “I think a lot of people felt that way, but I imagine we’ll think twice before we do it again.”

To skirt the city’s special event and sound permit requirements, an East Oakland venue operator said he would tell any police officers showing up outside that the music was part of a “private art event,” which would not require a permit. He would ask attendees for a donation, not a cover charge, because cover charges trigger a business license requirement by the city of Oakland, at an additional fee.

Even nonprofits have to be registered with the IRS if they are charging fees to get in. The operator said he served alcohol and food at the venue, which if he had applied for permits would require an alcohol license from the state and a health permit from Alameda County.

Even if they had all those permits, there’s also no way the city would sign off on any event at the venue because the warehouse is not up to code, the operator said. He staffed his events with his own emergency medical technicians, and made sure there were fire extinguishers and clearly marked exits.

David Keenan, a founding member of the Omni Commons, a licensed community events space in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, said he has banged his head against the wall trying to navigate the city’s permitting bureaucracy for special events.

Everything about the permitting system is designed to discourage the type of electronic music events that people want to hold, Keenan said, from dropping off special permit applications at the city’s Eastmont police substation on 73rd Avenue, to the applications themselves that say in block-faced letters: “Dancing is not permitted between 1 a.m. and 9 a.m.” Plus, permits have to be filed at least 30 days in advance.

And, it can also be incredibly costly, he said. Each permit has its own associated fee, and while special event permits are only $50, extended-hour cabaret licenses can run as high as $2,900, according to the city’s master fee schedule.

There’s also the added cost of hiring security for the event if the city deems it necessary, and acquiring insurance, which is also required. Keenan recently jumped through hoops for a fundraiser that doubled as a punk show and said it took him two weeks to find an insurer willing to back it.

“The insurance companies, straight up, will not insure a lot of underground events,” Keenan said. “They will insure country and western music but no hip-hop. They’ll insure a cover band but not a DJ doing electronic music.”

In Richmond, the city will simply not permit those events at all, said Recreation Department Director Rochelle Monk.

“That’s a flag for us to look a little deeper and to ask around to make sure (the events) are flagged for the police and fire departments,” Monk said. “That’s when the questions have to be asked because sometimes the applicants could say it’s for one event, but it’s actually a larger party.”

Priced out by cities that might permit their desired event and shut out by those that won’t, every genre has its own underground, said JoAnn Gillespie, who was heavily involved in Burnt Ramen shows in the past but is now the owner of the Rawking Horse Ranch near Briones Regional Park. She’s been going to underground shows in the Bay Area since she was a teenager in the late 1980s and compared the clandestine shows to the skateboarding culture of 25 years ago.

“We had ramps and would skate (empty swimming) pools — totally illegal, totally dangerous. Now there are skate parks in every town,” she said. “We went to City Council meetings and said ‘We need this,’ but that took 25 years.”

Erin Baldassari covers transportation, the Bay Area's housing shortage and breaking news. She served on the East Bay Times' 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning team for its coverage of the Ghost Ship fire. But most of all, she cares deeply about local news and hopes you do, too. If you'd like to support local journalism, please subscribe today.

More in News

As social media companies wrestle with how to police dangerous health misinformation on their platforms, Pinterest has taken an extreme approach: blocking search results related to vaccinations, whether the results are medically accurate or not.